Shivaji Bhosale – A Life

So, the more that I think about this, the more I begin to realize how daunting a project this is, because Shivaji’s life is basically an action movie.  The pseudo-founder of what would later be known as the Maratha Confederacy, Shivaji remains one of the most famous and heralded figures of Indian history.  Part of the difficulty is separating the myth and cult of personality that has now developed around Shivaji from the historical man.  Part of the distortion of Shivaji’s image is due to the Hindu Nationalist movement (hence, why I decided to talk about the Hindu Nationalists on Sunday), as he was the first Hindu ruler of any importance on the Indian subcontinent since the fall of the Vijayanagara Empire over a century before.  Shivaji’s conquests protected a Hindu faith that had come under increasing amounts of persecution under the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb, and he used the “moral high ground” as a major weapon in his war against the Mughals.

Shivaji was born in Pune in either 1627 or 1630.  Not real important which.  It is important to note, that Pune District remains one of the strongest bastions of the Hindu Nationalist movement to this day.  Nathuram Godse, the man who murdered Mahatma Gandhi, was, fun fact, also from Pune.  So when Shivaji was pretty young, in 1645, he apparently bribed a local official from the Bijapuri Sultanate (a minor state in the Deccan, in central India) to hand over a fort to him.  Now, you might not think this is a big deal, but explain to me how a minor 17th Century Indian monarch is supposed to conquer this…

Tornar Fort

Because that’s what Shivaji got.  Before long, another fort had pledged allegiance to him, and he had bribed a second commander out of his fort.  The Bijapuri Sultanate was not large enough to ignore something like this for long, because this was not the first time that the Maratha had been problematic.

It’s important to understand that around this time, Hindu philosophy was really taking off.  Unlike most religions, there’s no single figure that really founds it.  It is, rather, an accumulated set of beliefs and traditions that have been practiced in India for thousands of years beyond memory, and although there remained (and still do remain) substantial differences among Hindus, there was a certain common identity, and this gave people something to rally around.  At this time, Indian, and particularly Northern Indian, politics had been almost entirely dominated by Muslims for about 600 years, but the Muslims only made up an estimated 8% of the population at the time (it’s a little more now).  However, the “Hindus” never really thought of it as a religious war.  They viewed it as mostly an ethnic conflict with the invading Turks, but because they wrote so little about what they thought about the whole thing (or at least, almost none of it survives; a notable exception here is the Ardhakathanak by Banarsidas; it’s a pretty easy read and worth reading), we have little means to understand how the Muslims were understood.

What Shivaji brought to this was a military aspect.  He never phrased it in terms of a Hindu holy war but more as a Hindu/Maratha war of liberation.  He was strongly against forced conversion of Muslims, and he vehemently opposed slavery (although the Hindu caste system doesn’t seem so different from slavery to me).

So, like I was saying before I so rudely interrupted myself, the Bijapuri sultan sent around 30,000, maybe 40,000 guys against Shivaji under the Afghan general Afzal Khan.  Shivaji had managed to scrape together around 13,000 by way of comparison, and he had no muskets, compared to Afzal Khan’s 1500.  The pair of them met at Pratapgad, and since Shivaji held this fortified position…

The Fort at Pratapgad

Afzal Khan decided he would negotiate with him.  What followed was a classic “Han shot first” argument.  Some claim that Afzal struck first, while others claim that Shivaji (who, one way or another, definitely brought a dagger to a no-weapons parley, which is more than a little shady) attacked Afzal.  One way or another, Shivaji lived (if he hadn’t, this would be a very anti-climactic story), and he and his army routed the now leaderless Bijapuris.  By 1660, the Bijapuris had forged an alliance with the Mughals against Shivaji.  One of the issues with subduing the Maratha, however, was the terrain.  You saw the two forts that I showed above.  Dotting the entire rocky, hilly landscape of Maharastra are forts just like or similar to these, and since Shivaji held them with full garrisons of men, he was a nightmare to subdue.  It didn’t matter how many people the Mughals sent, manpower was not what was needed.  What was needed was better artillery than existed on the Indian subcontinent, or anywhere, for that matter.

Shivaji would never be powerful enough to challenge the Mughal Emperor Aurangzeb directly, and after eluding him for years, Shivaji was captured in 1666 and taken to Agra.  The details of this part are a little shaky, because the guy either seduced the Emperor’s wife with nothing but the hungry eyes (I’m guessing not), or he just disguised himself and found his way out of Agra. Shivaji’s army had taken a tough hit from clashing directly with the Mughals, but the notion of independence had taken root in the hill country of Maharastra (that’s where the Maratha live and where they speak Marathi).

As he got his army back on its feet, Shivaji made a few raids against the British in Bombay (which at the time was rather small, compared to the 20 million person metro population it has today), but for the most part he was pretty quiet.  Suddenly, in 1674, when most of the Indian Subcontinent seems to have believed that Shivaji was out of the picture, Shivaji scored a large victory at the Battle of Nesari against the Bijapuris after the Mughals had withdrawn, and Bijapuri power was effectively broken in Maharastra.  Worsening relations between Bijapur and Aurangzeb would eventually result in the latter conquering the Bijapuri Sultanate in 1686.

With his lands secured, Shivaji was crowned Chhatrapati of the Maratha Realm later in 1674, and over the next century, the Maratha would become the most powerful empire on the Indian Subcontinent, only being subdued by the surge of British military presence in the early 19th Century.  For the last several years of his life, Shivaji fought to secure a stable inheritance for his sons, and that would mean not provoking the Mughal Empire, so instead of attacking the Mughals, he moved south, acquiring additional lands there and surrounding the lucrative Portuguese trading port of Goa, giving him an essential trading partner.  Unlike many great military men, Shivaji ensured that his sons would be able to do what he never was – directly challenge the Mughal Empire rather than simply defy it, as he had.  This (kind of grainy) map shows the extent of his realm at the end of his life:

So when you look at the size of what Shivaji created, you probably think “Oooooh… what big empire…” but the importance of Shivaji lies not with what his end accomplishments were.  Of all these countries you see on the map (and others existed elsewhere) Shivaji was the only Hindu ruler, despite the fact that around 90% of India was Hindu at this time, and, as I mentioned, that gives him considerable cultural significance to this day.  Not to mention, he’s notorious for all kinds of badassery that I didn’t really have time to go into here (I mean, ripping a general open with a knife and escaping prison is cool and all, but catching arrows mid-flight is way cooler).  He’s the kind of guy who spends almost three decades (1645-1674) of his life either holed up in forts or on the run in the Maharastra countryside, eluding powerful emperors and sultans the whole time.  His life was an action movie, and honestly, Hollywood should pick it up (although Bollywood’s already done a few decent jobs on it).

The Danger of Hindu Nationalism

So, I don’t want to be a downer here, but this is something that’s important, so although I typically don’t write opinion pieces, this is one.  Hindu Nationalism is a vocal minority in the world’s largest democracy, and so it’s a really big deal.  Using the IMF’s numbers, India is the second largest economy in the world.  The UN and World Bank rank them a little lower, but they’re still in the top 10 by pretty much any metric you look at.  India is #3 in terms of real GDP growth rate among countries with over 60 million people.  That’s ahead of touted up-and-coming economies like China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.  India’s rate of 7.3% is three times that of the United States, and they have the worlds fourth largest military (assuming North Korea’s numbers are correct and not over-inflated).

I hope that I’ve convinced you that India and her 1.2 billion people are important, because I’m going to start talking about Hindu Nationalism now.  Sometimes termed “Hindu polity,” Hindu Nationalism really started taking off in the early 19th Century in India, as a sort of response to the British occupation.  Uprisings against increasing British power had taken shape in the form of the Maratha Confederacy (I’ve got a post to do with that on Tuesday), the Sikhs in the North, and the Kingdom of Mysore in the South, but all of these had made little effect against the British Raj.  Indian political theorists began to argue that the only way that India could truly become Indian again would be to unite.

Well, that all sounds fine and dandy on the surface until you start thinking about it.  When had India ever been united?  Never.  Aurangzeb, the great Mughal Emperor, had managed to extend tentative control over the South,  but the speed with which his empire disintegrated after his death calls into question how much control the Mughals truly had.  So, where does the notion of “India” come from?  Well, it wasn’t a uniquely European idea, but it had not historical precedent until 1948, with India’s independence, and what did the Hindu Nationalists do to the man who had brought India’s independence about (Mahatma Gandhi)?  They shot him three times in the chest at point-blank range.  Hindu Nationalists don’t want a united India.  They want their united India, because there’s a right kind of India and a wrong kind of India.

Nathuram Godse, the man who assassinated Mahatma Gandhi, was a member of the RSS (Rāṣṭrīya Svayamsēvaka Saṅgha, or National Volunteer Organization), a controversial group that has admittedly done a number of good things. The RSS is well-known for its blood drives during the Bangladeshi Revolution in 1971 and responding quickly and effectively to humanitarian crises – often better than the government.  In 1975, when Indira Gandhi attempted to suspend the Constitution, the RSS were on the front lines protesting her, despite her unilateral suspension of the right to free speech.  I’m not here to tell you that the RSS is bad because they’re Hindu Nationalist.  I’m saying they’re dangerous and Hindu Nationalist and that there’s a strong correlation between having this far-right perspective and being dangerous.  The fact that the RSS has been associated in some way with almost every major Hindu Nationalist movement in the last forty years or so is concerning.  Its role in the destruction and vandalism of mosques is concerning.

Narendra Modi

The RSS is currently closely associated with the BJP – Bharatiya Janata Party (Indian People’s Party) – the group currently in charge and from which Narendra Modi, the Indian Prime Minister, hails.  Typically the BJP prioritizes the globalization of India and the promotion of a robust, industrialized economy over social welfare (the MO of the Indian National Congress), and, although there’s far more nuance to it than this, one could potentially label the BJP as more similar in terms of economic policy to the Republican Party in the United States and the INC as more similar to the Democratic Party.  Socially, however, the INC would lie somewhere in the middle in the United States, while the BJP lies far to the right.

So a little on Modi now.  He was initially loved by the Western media.  I mean, this was a guy who was going to fix up Indian politics and fix up the economy, just like he had as Chief Minister of Gujarat state.  Economically, India’s done pretty well under him, but since his election in 2014, hundreds of violent attacks on non-Hindus, particularly Muslims, have been carried out with little response from the government.  People like to tout Modi’s success in Gujarat, but they seem to forget about a few little things that happened in 2002, when as many as 2500 Muslims were killed in February and March.

Local volunteers attempt to extinguish a train fire during the Gujarat Riots

Modi was incapable of reeling the violence in, which might lead one to question whether the BJP politician was even interested in stopping the anti-Muslim killings.  Critics will also point out that the violence was cleaned up when the violence started spilling over to Hindus.  Now, none of this can be officially tied back to Modi himself, and he has done a good job of keeping corruption at arm’s length away from him, but still, it happened on his watch.  When BJP politicians such as Manohar Lal Khattar are saying that they think people who eat beef should leave the country, it might suggest that the far right is not so far away from the BJP as one might like to pretend.

In the words of James Carville, “The economy, stupid.”  People don’t really care about civil issues that much when their pocketbooks are suffering.  I’m not saying that’s right – quite the opposite – but it’s also unreasonable to expect anything different, particularly in a country with so many people who cannot survive if their pocketbooks suffer, and when Narendra Modi can offer real economic change like he did in Gujarat, people are going to vote for him, particularly after years of domination by the INC.

Here’s my counterpoint, however.  There is a common-sense correlation, that is backed up somewhat by statistics, but the methods of gathering such data are suspect, between civil peace and economic growth.  Can we really expect people to go out and invest and spend money if they are afraid to do so?  If they are afraid that the government is hostile to their way of life?  Don’t forget that Modi’s successes in Gujarat came after the end of the 2002 riots.  If the BJP wishes to be an effective, uniting voice in Indian politics it is going to have to start reaching across the aisle, and as long as Modi continues to pretend that he has the majority and the mandate in New Delhi that he had in Gujarat, real socio-economic change will not happen.